61,000 Baghdad residents executed by Saddam: survey

Saddam Hussein's government may have executed 61,000 Baghdad residents, a figure much higher than previously believed, a new study suggests.

The bloodiest massacres of Saddam's 23-year presidency occurred in Iraq's Kurdish north and Shi'ite Muslim south, but the Gallup Baghdad Survey data indicates the brutality also extended into the capital.

The survey asked 1178 Baghdad residents in August and September whether a member of their household had been executed by Saddam's regime, with 6.6 per cent saying yes.

The polling firm took metropolitan Baghdad's population of 6.39 million people, and average household size of 6.9 people, to calculate that 61,000 people were executed during Saddam's rule.

Past estimates were in the low tens of thousands. Most are believed to have been buried in mass graves.

The US-led occupation authority in Iraq has said at least 300,000 people were buried in mass graves in Iraq.

Human rights officials put the number closer to 500,000, and some Iraqi political parties estimate more than 1 million people were executed.

Without exhumations of the mass graves, it is impossible to confirm a figure.

Scientists said during a recent investigation that they had confirmed 41 mass graves on a list of suspected sites that covers 270 locations.

Forensic teams will begin to exhume four of those graves next month, searching for evidence for a new tribunal, expected to be established this week, that will try members of the former regime for crimes against humanity and genocide.

More graves will later be added to the list.

But nobody expects all the mass graves to be exhumed, and nobody expects to ever know the full number of Iraqis executed by Saddam's regime.

Richard Burkholder, who headed Gallup's Baghdad team, said the numbers in Baghdad could be high for two reasons.

He said people may have understood "household" to be broader than just the people living at their address.

He also said some families may have moved to the capital from other areas since the executions occurred.

"Anecdotal accounts start to support it, but they don't get you to 60,000," he said from Princeton, New Jersey.

Even reducing the numbers slightly because of those possibilities, however, he said the number of executions the data suggest is higher than previously estimated, in the low tens of thousands.

The survey, which had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points, was conducted in face-to-face interviews in Baghdad residents' homes in August and September.

The people were selected at random from all geographic sectors of the Baghdad metropolitan area, and more than nine in 10 agreed to participate.

The deadliest atrocity associated with Saddam's regime was the scorched-earth campaign known as the Anfal, in which the government killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in Iraq's far north.

Many were buried in mass graves far from home in the southern desert.

Another 60,000 people are believed to have been killed when Saddam violently suppressed rebellions by Shi'ite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north at the close of the 1991 Gulf War.

Sandra Hodgkinson, director of the US-led occupation authority's human rights office, estimated that about 50,000 others were executed during Saddam's reign, including Kurds killed in chemical attacks and political prisoners sent to execution. That 50,000 figure also would include prisoners killed in Baghdad.